About Moore’s Law

Moore's law states that the number of transistors on a microprocessor chip will double every two
years. The law stayed true since 70’s, but the doubling has already started to falter (Waldrop, 2016).

The speed of light is finite and constant, and provides a natural limitation on the number of
computations that can be processed in a second via a single transistor, as the information cannot
be passed quicker than a speed of light. Currently bits are modeled by electrons travelling through
transistors, thus the speed of computation is limited by the speed of electron moving through
matter. Wires and transistors are characterized by capacitance C (capacity to store electrons) and
resistance R (how much they resist flow of the current). With miniaturization R goes up and C goes
down and it becomes more difficult to perform correct computations.

Another factor slowly killing Moore’s law is growing costs related to energy, cooling and
manufacturing. The size of transistors is reached very low levels where maintaining a stable
temperature is physically impossible. On the other hand, building new CPUs or GPUs can cost a lot.
It costs around $170m to manufacture a new 10nm chip, almost $300m for a 7nm chip and over
$500m for a 5nm chip. Those numbers can only grow with some specialized chips, e.g. NVidia spent
over $2bn on R&D to produce a GPU designed to accelerate AI (Chojecki, 2019).

References
Chojecki, P. (2019, 2 19). Retrieved from Medium: https://towardsdatascience.com/moores-law-
is-dead-678119754571

Waldrop, M. (2016, 2 9). Retrieved from Nature: https://www.nature.com/news/the-chips-are-

down-for-moore-s-law-1.19338